1972 - A Story Like the Wind (31 page)

The first thing he did when back in his room was to wrap the tissue in a sheet of brown paper and tie it up with string. Although he would never know what prompted him to do so, he took the little parcel to Ouwa’s study, extracted a stick of red sealing wax from his drawer, lit the wick and dropped a large red blob of melted wax on the knot of the string and then sealed it down with Ouwa’s private seal, which he had used in the days when he had been the head of a department of state. For some odd reason, he felt better after that, leaving Ouwa’s study so like someone coming out of the side-door of a church that one is compelled to explain his behaviour in a way which he could not do, but which was familiar to the pagan world about him. The nearer one comes to the great imponderable forces of nature and the more one moves in the presence of the unknown gods of the bush to seek their help, the more urgent it is to have a formal, precise and respectful ritual for one’s advances. Thus the pagan in François which one has observed before, came by instinct to his rescue where the reason of Lammie and Ouwa would have failed him, and provided him with the only possible way to the appropriate state of grace before the Lords of the bush, whom The Right Honourable Sun-Is-Hot was only one of many servants.

François was up and about ready for the journey just as Dawn’s Heart showed above the dark line of the fig trees at the bottom of the garden. Ousie-Johanna was already there in the kitchen, not only with his breakfast and supplies ready but with a large tin of condensed milk and an even bigger bottle of castor oil, which she wanted François to take as her gift for The Right Honourable Sun-Is-Hot. François thought the sweet milk made sense but he had such strong feelings himself on the subject of castor oil that he feared nothing could be more likely to antagonize uLangalibalela. At the moment of his greatest doubt, however, !#grave;Bamuthi appeared to fetch him. Seeing the large bottle of castor oil on the table, he congratulated Ousie-Johanna so profusely on such an imaginative contribution to their gifts that François realized he had nearly made a grave tactical error.

Leaving Ousie-Johanna in tears as well as in doubts that she had perhaps induced François to take on more than was fair for a person so young, and exhorting !#grave;Bamuthi, therefore, at great and unnecessary length exactly how he should take care of him, the two of them left for the Matabele kraals. !#grave;Bamuthi carried the muzzle-loader, already loaded, in case of immediate need, powder-horn and lead bullet-wallet as well as a large haversack full of provisions on his shoulders. François carried another haversack also full of provisions with that sealed little brown paper parcel underneath them. He also, for once, had his best bush hat on his head. He had been in two minds whether to take a hat with him or not, until !#grave;Bamuthi had insisted on it, finally settling the matter by saying: ‘So that you will have it on to take off at the proper moment, Little Feather.’

With Hintza alert and excited at his heels they made their way to the kraals where Night and Day and Little Finger were being held ready for them. Loaded as he was, !#grave;Bamuthi insisted on adding to his armoury his finest hunting spear,
U-Simsela-Banta-Bami
[He-Digs-Up-For-My-Children] and the great club
Igumgehle
[The-Greedy-One], commenting as he did so that, on this narrow zigzag track on which they were going, a man could not be too well prepared.

François somehow had assumed that he and Hintza would go at the head of the line, but !#grave;Bamuthi had other ideas. He made it clear from the start that he alone was in charge. He told François that he would go ahead leading Little Finger; then Night and Day would follow, and François and Hintza would come last. All he begged François to do was on no account to lag behind but to keep in a close, compact formation.

If he, !#grave;Bamuthi, became aware of any danger in front he would stand still at once and raise his hand high above his head. No, not the hand with the spear because the blade might catch a flash of light and betray them. He would raise the hand which held the black heifer’s lead. It would be a sign for François to come up as quietly as he could to hear and see what it was that !#grave;Bamuthi feared. He himself would be watching constantly over his shoulder. But should anything disturb François when he was not looking, François was to make a small noise like a baby fever bird and !#grave;Bamuthi would come immediately to his side. Above all Hintza had to keep close to François.

So there and then, before sunrise, the little procession vanished into the bush on a track which after the first ten miles or so was completely new to François. It was astonishing to the people at the kraal, used as they were to these sights, how quickly and completely the awakening bush swallowed them up. They, of course, had never seen the Great Water but, had they seen it, they would have known that the bush was for them what the sea was to fishermen and sailors, and Hunter’s Drift a safe and welcome harbour. Men would suddenly come out of the bush, like ships over the horizon of the sea, to dock for a night or two at Hunter’s Drift and on leaving they would vanish as’ François, !#grave;Bamuthi, Night and Day, Little Finger and Hintza vanished into the copper-roofed forest of the burnished morning, with only one great difference. Whereas the arrival and departure of strangers might occasion surprise and interest, the departure and disappearance of one’s own struck at the hearts of those left behind, because that bush, full of as many voices as the five oceans, and so full of hidden forces, made them as uncertain of the travellers’ return as those who once watched the black ships at the beginning of man’s Odyssey disappearing over the rim of a wine-dark sea.

For the first mile or so !#grave;Bamuthi kept up a conversation with François without bothering to turn his head while doing so, in the manner of a people so accustomed to journeying through life in single file along winding footpaths. When he did look back it was only to make certain that his little convoy was keeping proper formation. But so soon did they all fall into the routine he wanted that even the occasional backward glance became unnecessary.

Once they had crossed the unmarked boundary where the track entered the unknown, !#grave;Bamuthi signalled to him that it would be as well from now on to keep silent so that they could concentrate. It was always extraordinary to François that a bush which reverberated so much with the sound of bird, insect and animal life when observed from the great clearing around his home, could be so silent, grave and sombre when one was deep within it. He had questioned Mopani once about this strange phenomenon. Mopani had told him that it was because the trunks of the trees were so tightly interlaced with thorn bushes, shrubs and creepers of all kinds, the rare spaces of unclaimed ground were so thickly overgrown with tall grasses, as well as padded with the dense multitudes of leaves, that any sound except their own stifled before it was born.

It was indeed remarkable that although !#grave;Bamuthi and the two heifers were only a few yards ahead, François could not hear the sound of their movements. What was stranger still were the great bush apes, swinging like acrobats in a circus, from tree to tree at the end of the long creepers that the Matabele called monkey-rope. As they passed over the track and saw this little procession close underneath them, they would utter cries of alarm and warning to the rest of their family still hidden nearby in the trees. François could see their long lips draw wide apart, their pink gums glistening, their white teeth bared and mouths wide open, as they did so, yet no sound at all reached his ears.

There was only one exception and that came at about ten in the morning when it was really hot and all the billions of mopani beetles, hidden behind the butterfly leaves of the trees, began to sing their Messiah to the day. The hotter and brighter the day, the louder they sang, until it sounded as if all the insect minstrels of Africa had come together to celebrate. By two o’clock in the afternoon the silver sound was deafening. It was also so hot that the collar of François’s bush shirt seemed to burn the skin at the back of his neck whenever they came in contact. He knew from his own experience and from Mopani and !#grave;Bamuthi that all animals in the bush, even the black mamba with its heart of ice, would now be fast asleep. Yet these dedicated beetles just went on and on with their singing, louder than ever. François did not object to this at all. To him there was something fantastically exhilarating about their singing. When the transport of sound was at its highest, !#grave;Bamuthi halted them for the first time and all together they rested for an hour in the shade of the densest tree they could find. But so strong was the sun that even there the shade was only a paler form of sunlight.

François had thought that having walked so far without rest they had done rather well. Not so !#grave;Bamuthi, who had done the journey many times before. He said he was sorry he had had to force the pace, but they were about to enter a depression where the bush was at its thickest and would end in a long savannah full of antelope of all kinds; and therefore also full of lion and leopard. Considering how great a temptation two fat heifers, not to mention Hintza, would be to animals of prey, he wanted to get to a particular place well before dark, where he hoped they could spend the night in comparative safety.

He was interrupted by a startling demonstration of how far from empty already the bush had become. Hintza, who had been lying close to François with Night and Day bedded down next to him, her eyes shut for an obviously welcome siesta, was suddenly on his feet. The change from sleeping to being fully awake was swift and complete. Already the magnetic pattern of hair on the ridge of his back was erect and his nose and tail were pointing in the direction from which some warning had reached his acute senses. He had hardly posed himself for pointing when, dense as the bush and loud as the insect hosannahs were, a noise of wood, crackling as if on fire, crashed through the sound.

The mopani beetles stopped their singing. !#grave;Bamuthi leapt to his feet, seized his own heifer by the halter and whispered imperatively to François, ‘Quick, Little Feather, quick I’ and led off the track sideways into the bush.

Night and Day, however, was enjoying her siesta so much that her only response was to open her purple-black eyes reluctantly and look reproachfully at François from underneath her Hollywood eyelashes. François had to order Hintza in his fiercest Bushman to remind Night and Day that she was not there just for fun but on active service. Hintza responded by giving the tip of her tail a sharp nip with his teeth. It was something Night and Day had experienced before in longer and sharper measures in her kindergarten days with François and, coming to her feet, she trotted off smartly after her black companion.

Fortunately they did not have far to go. !#grave;Bamuthi had come to a halt behind a clump of enormous assegai trees where he signalled to François to join him. There they stood, partially hidden, while the crackling became louder and louder until at last they saw on the track which they had just abandoned an enormous old bull elephant come striding past with all the pomp of Admiralty, swaying sailor-wise in his walk.

The bull was followed by a procession of cows and their young, completely at ease. Because of their poor eyesight, and the fact that the total absence of any movement of air in that dead hour of the day made their fine sense of smell useless, they were unaware of the presence of strangers in their vicinity. They gave themselves time to stop and pluck some of the more subtle delicacies of the bush for the young calves who were with them. After stripping a wild raisin bush of all its brown, succulent berries, they would stand still with expressions of intense gratification on their wise, wrinkled old faces, watching the joy which the unexpected sweetness gave the calves. They had time, too, for stopping to fondle and encourage the smallest of these who showed signs of flagging in the heat. Sometimes they would urge them along gently with a nudge of their granite heads when affectionate persuasion failed to make them move.

With all their obvious depth of feeling, they seemed to have an almost human awareness of the need of discipline. A young bull calf, who already had more than his fair share of berries and was trying to snatch away the ration of one of his weaker companions, was immediately set upon by irate elephant mothers who walloped him so smartly with their trunks on his behind that he blew a toy-trumpet scream of pain before promptly giving way.

Then there came what proved to be the climax of this ‘happening’ in the bush. Just beyond the point where !#grave;Bamuthi had left the track, two large assegai trees, no doubt undermined by the formidable armies of white ants who constantly marauded the bush, had collapsed and thrown a barricade across the track. The elderly elephants and the adolescent calves had no difficulty in stepping over the barricade. But there was one little calf who found it impossible. So two elephants who apparently were responsible for conveying the rear of their procession, turned back, stepped back over the barricade and took up position on either side of the little calf, who was beginning to whimper pitifully with dismay. They put their trunks underneath its stomach and carefully helped it scramble over the fallen tree-trunks. So delighted was the little calf at being restored to its family that it ran up and down the line, almost like a puppy, thanking the rest of the crowd by fondling them with its trunk. François then heard the strange rumbling sound of the stomachs of well-fed elephants, not boiling with rage like that Uprooter of Great Trees but gently, as though it were the elephant equivalent of purring. But no sooner had the grey, wrinkled behind of the last great old elephant (so like the baggy flannel trousers of an old country gentleman in danger of parting with a last button) vanished around the curve of the track than the rumbling vanished and once more the mopani beetles took to their devotions.

!#grave;Bamuthi’s dark eyes were shining and his deep bass voice, although low, was round with contentment as he exclaimed, ‘It is a good sign, Little Feather. You see what a great seer and doctor uLangalibalela is. Even the Lords of the forest are going his way.’